By Jared Warner
Willow Creek Friends Church
January 11, 2026
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Acts 10:34–43 (ESV)
34 So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. 36 As for the word that he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), 37 you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: 38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. 39 And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, 40 but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, 41 not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. 43 To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
We have moved away from the season of Christmas and into the season of Epiphany. This season is one we do not think much about it is situated between the much more famous Christmas and the forty days of fasting we find during Lent, as we move toward Easter. But there is significance to this season. It is the season of revelation. It celebrates the baptism of Jesus, where the Spirit descends upon Jesus, and a voice says from the heavens, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.” There are skeptics that will say that the Trinity is not found in scripture, and they are right the word is not found, but there are instances like at the baptism of Jesus where all three persons are present at one moment.
This season does not only focus on the baptism of Jesus though. It also looks at a couple of other revelatory moments. According to the Hebrew teachings on hygiene, a woman is required to wait a certain amount of time before she can reenter society. During this period of time she is regarded as unclean. We often equate the term unclean with sinfulness, but it is not a sin to bear a child. It is far from sinful. What makes this process unclean is that it is not always easy, many bodily fluids are released and it is for a lack of a better description, gross. But even the grossness of birth does not make someone unclean, what makes them unclean is that the person is losing those fluids. The life force, as they might regard it, is being drained away as blood leaves the body. When the life force is draining, death is near.
The unclean status is not sin, but the presences of potential death. That is why those that are unclean cannot enter the presence of God, because death cannot exist in the presence of life. And how can we make a judgment on this? We observe. The reproductive process expels fluids of life, those that engage are unclean. Those with leprosy have an observable skin condition that often has discharge, they are unclean. Those that have been wounded and are bleeding are unclean and those that assist them are also unclean, not because it is a sin to help those in need, but we are in the presence of potential death.
The teaching surrounding childbirth stated that women were considered unclean for a period of time following birth. The bearer of life, being considered unclean is almost strange, unless you realize birth, and the few weeks following birth are when women face the greatest amount of potential health complications. They are literally on a razor’s edge between life and death. They are unclean because death is lurching nearby. But after the prescribed period of time, the women are no longer considered unclean. They bath themselves, and they go with their husband to the temple and they present sacrifices and offerings to God. Epiphany also celebrates this time within the life of the Holy Family, because it was at the temple during the time of worship and celebration of the birth of Jesus, that Simeon and Anna came and spoke prophecies and worshiped Jesus as their long awaited Messiah.
Then there is a third celebration that occurs around Epiphany, that is when the Magi from the East come to pay homage to the newly born king of the Jews. They left their land following the star. This star is something of scholarly debate, was it a comet, a super nova, was it a unique configuration of the various pagan zodiacs? We unfortunately do not know for sure what those magi saw. What we do know is that they were early astronomers. They watched and studied the paths of the starts. And as they watched the stars they learned something of the laws of nature, that govern the physics of life. They were religious and scholarly men likely from the land of Persia. And when we look at the Old Testament, we would find that Daniel once walked among the magi in the exile.
These magi knew the teachings of Daniel, and that teaching was carried forward into the understanding of these pagan priests, generations after Daniel’s death. And when they observed some celestial abnormality, their attention was drawn to Israel. And they left their home, so that they could pay their respects to this newly born king.
We often do not think that deeply about the magi, or the wise men. They are often just a minor part of the overall narrative, and we include them in the story because they came bearing gifts. Gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. We remember the wise men not because they were wise but because they had gifts, we like gifts.
Their presence in this story is important. It shows us that there was something from the very beginning that God was doing to bring those outside Israel, into the story. It shows us that the salvation, the lordship, and dominion of God reaches beyond our walls, beyond our culture, and even beyond our religion to reach out to the people throughout the entire world.
We often miss this in the narrative of scripture. We often look at Israel as being the chosen people, and that the Gentile races are brought into that promise through adoption. This is not completely wrong. It is also not completely correct. If we are to believe that all humans emerged from two ancient parents, Adam and Eve, then the promise given to Eve applies to off of her offspring. If we are to believe that all of creation was engulfed by the flood during the days of Noah, then the promise given to Noah and his sons and daughter-in-laws apply to all humanity. These are the teachings of the Hebrew scriptures. They include all people, not just one branch of the human race. It is only during the third fall of humanity that things begin to take a different turn. There was a people that became dominate within the cultures of men. They build a great city, they had wealth and power over their adversaries. They were the world’s superpower. And within this nation of people, they decided that they were so advance, and powerful that they should be equal to or at least have a place at the table among the divine council. So they built a tower. They built a mountain that would reach up into the heavens so that they could take a seat among the gods. This angered God, it angered God for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason was that this nation was arrogant. They thought in their minds that everything they did was by divine right. That they were basically gods blessing the earth. At that moment God began to act, Deuteronomy says that God confused the languages, and divided the people of the earth among the sons of God, and that God had kept Israel as his portion.
The interesting thing about this story is that Abraham had not yet been called to follow God. Isaac had yet to even become a glimmer in the eyes of his father’s mind. And Esau and Jacob were still nearly two hundred years away from existence. God gave all the people of the world to the sons of god, or lessor spiritual beings, he gave these beings everything except for one man and one woman. A man and a woman that had no future, not heritage, and no inheritance. And God called out to that man, urging him to follow him and through him he would make a great nation. A nations’ whose offspring would out number the grains of sand, and would be greater than the stars in the heavens. And they would become the light to the nations.
Was Israel chosen, yes. They were chosen not because they were greater than all other people on the earth. They were chosen because they were nothing without God. But within that same promise to Abraham, there is something profound. God chose Israel to be his portion, but Israel had a purpose, it was through them that God’s wisdom, his light, would return to all the nations.
The interesting thing is this concept of light, and that God told Abraham that his offspring would be like the stars, which illuminate the darkness. Light is a metaphor for wisdom. This is why every cartoon we watched as children put a light bulb above the heads of the characters that have great ideas. This is why the era of history surrounding our nation’s foundation was called the Enlightenment. We believed that we had greater wisdom, greater understanding that would take out out of the dark ages into the light of wisdom. God said that Israel would be the light to the nations. That his commandments, his teachings would pass through Israel and be established throughout the entire world.
I know that many of us might not believe it, but this is happening. The human rights initiatives of the past century have made the world we live in today better than any other period of history. That does not mean that everything is good, it is clear that there is much to improve in that area. But overall world poverty is down. More people have access to medical facilities than ever before. More people have access to education. Much of this improvement has come because people believed that no matter who you were you had dignity as a human being. Where does this concept of human dignity come from? Did it come from Egypt? Persia? No, it comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, that humanity is created in the image of God, and that we should not bear that name in vain.
But like with most things, we justify things. The wise men were told by the King of the Jews to come tell him where to find the baby so he too could pay him due honor. They saw through the veiled threat to the child’s life. They saw through the threat, because they were warned in a dream. Sure they were told but they were wise enough to recognize that God had spoken and they listened. Herod then justified in his own mind that it he had every right to go into Bethlehem and kill every male child under the age of two years old, because he had the mandate of power. What threat did a two year old child pose to an elderly king? This is part of the season of Epiphany. Or the Revelation. It has been revealed to us that as humans we have a responsibility to look beyond the surface, and to recognize the selfish justifications of this world. We have a responsibility to reflect the light that is shown around us, once we have been enlightened.
“So Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’”
Peter like so many of us lived within a culture that had prejudices. He grew up thinking that the people of Samaria were dogs. He grew up in a culture that would complain under their breath about the occupation of the land of Israel, while willingly accepting the coins they used within their economy. He justified his prejudices based on his interpretation of the teachings of scripture, or on his own feelings, He was just like each of us can be, a hypocrite. But God came to him on the roof of a house while he in prayer. And during that moment of visitation, God revealed something profound.
Peter was hungry while he was on the roof in prayer, and he fell into a trance. He saw the heavens open and a great sheet descended to the earth. It was like a giant table cloth being lowered from heaven and on that table were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds, and a voiced said to him, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” Peter in his self-righteousness said to the voice, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.”
This happened three times and then the trance was broken. There are things in this world we find to be common and unclean. We have our own justification for this. We might even have the power of scripture or of law to back us up, but there is something that goes beyond that, the wisdom of God.
Why did God command, or teach that the Hebrew people abstain from certain foods? We may never know for certain, but there are several theories. One theory in regard to pork, is that pork is not a value added animal. It has basically only one use. You eat the meat. The hide of a pig was not well suited for clothing, the milk produced by the females of the species was not in abundance enough to justify the production of cheese. So this animal had only one purpose, it existed only to eat and be eaten. Where as sheep produce wool as well as milk and meat. Cattle also provide additional economic returns. But pork although tasty, only has one purpose. This is not good in establishing a sustainable society, it is a society of subsistence not abundance. Not to mention pigs in large numbers ruin the land.
Another theory deals primarily with health. The animals regarded as unclean often have some aspect of their biology that would make them unsafe to eat without extra precautions. As a child I would often be encouraged to hunt rabbits with my pellet gun, because the rabbits would eat the garden, but we rarely ate the rabbits. There was a reason for this. If you do not clean a rabbit properly it can make you sick. And if you do not cook it properly it can make you sick. The vast majority of the rabbits I hunted would be given to the cats and dogs living on our farm. And according to scripture a rabbit is considered an unclean animal. But notice I said the vast majority we did not eat. This rightfully implies that I have eaten rabbit, and the meat when raised properly can be just as nutritious as any protein source. But we need to be careful. The same can be applied to almost every animal mentioned in scripture.
My personal observation about the unclean animals in scripture is their diet. The vast majority of the animals considered unclean, eat meat. I think that is significant, especially when you consider protein based diseases. When animals are fed proteins that their bodies cannot fully digest, there can be a build up of malformed proteins called prions, that the bodies cannot expel. This can cause the disease that often scare the people of Europe called Mad Cow Disease. These prions can become more abundant within animals that eat higher meat protein based diets. It may not affect them but the could pose a greater risk to us.
Now that I am completely off topic, Peter, was given a vision where all of these animals were on the table available to eat. He had his reasons for avoiding their consumption, culturally, religiously, and preferentially. Yet God did not congratulate him on his obedience to the law or his personal piety, instead God called him out saying, “What God has made clean, do not call common.”
This perplexed Peter. I shook him to the very core of who he was, it challenged his identity and his ideologies. God had always been the God of Israel. He had given them the law, and they had tried their best to follow it. Yet now God is seemingly changing his mind.
Peter sat with that revelation for a while. It might be good to note that the place he was doing all of this was on the roof of a tanner, which was a lifestyle considered unclean in Jewish culture also. So Peter recognized that it was just to visit the tanner, yet not eat the food. He justified one thing but could not justify the other. He was imposing on God his own interpretations, but through this vision he came to an understanding. “God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”
No one is too far from God. No one is too good for God. No one is saved apart from God. And no one is excluded. Yet is this how we live?
We dehumanize our enemies saying that they are terrorists, narco-terrorists, or some other term. We look at the political party that we oppose and we give them dehumanizing names. We justify the complete demonization of entire population groups because they do not exceed our own righteousness, and we justify our own failings by saying nobody is perfect. We engage in both sidesisims because they did something we do not feel is right but it is fine when we have the mandate of power. The reality is that God shows no partiality. God will not provide you with justification just because you had power, no you will be judged according to the justice you give to others.
That should scare some of us. Have we treated the people around us with justice? Peter opened his mouth and said, “Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” Yet what did he receive? They hung him on a tree. Why did they hang him on a tree? We can theologically explain this by saying that his sacrifice provided the atonement we needed to become sanctified before a holy God. We would be right. But this still does not change the facts that humanly speaking Jesus was killed because he made powerful people uncomfortable. He showed them the reality of their actions and their intentions. He showed them that just like Herod justified the killing of every male toddler in a province, we justify the mass murder of countless others for our own reasons. We deny them justice, we deny their humanity, we have denied that they like us are humans and joint bearers of the image of God.
They killed him, but God was not finished. God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead, and he commanded us to testify. And what is that testimony? Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. Everyone who believes is brought into God’s family no matter their background or their diet. God does not show partiality. And we are called to reflect his ways, not our own.
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